Blue Genes

KINFLICKS

by LISA ALTHER 503 pages. Knopf. $8.95.

First novels are the stepchildren of the book family. Publishers--when they agree to print one at all--seem to run off only enough copies for the author and his immediate family. Which is just as well, since none but the most cavernous bookstores bother much about making shelf space for debuts. The self-fulfilling prophecy is then in full operation: the books fail to sell, and no one is surprised.

Twitching Ganglia. Exceptions to this procrustean rule are rare enough to be newsworthy. Lisa Alther's Kinflicks is enjoying a first printing of 30,000 copies, is a forthcoming alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and the subject of considerable prepublication hyperbole. When the ganglia of the New York literary world begin to twitch in this manner, it is a sure sign that something more than literary merit is at work. First books by unknowns do not become events simply because they are good. Frequently, as Mae West once observed in another context, goodness has nothing to do with it.

Kinflicks, in fact, is soaring in the slip stream of Fear of Flying, Erica Jong's bestselling hymn to the body electric. The novel proves again--if any doubters still remain--that women can write about physical functions just as frankly and, when the genes move them, as raunchily as men. It strikes a blow for the picara by putting a heroine through the same paces that once animated a Tom Jones or a Holden Caulfield. And it suggests that life seen from what was once called the distaff side suspiciously resembles the genitalia-centered existence that male novelists have so long monopolized. The organs are different; the scoring is the same.

Kinflicks is also an abundantly entertaining progress through the unsettled 60s. Virginia Hull Babcock, 27, comes home to Tennessee to care for her ailing mother. The act is not exactly unselfish, since Ginny has nowhere else to go; her Vermont husband has just thrown her out for practicing sexual yoga with a Viet Nam War resister. The home-town setting reminds Ginny of the home movies--kinflicks, as she and her two brothers called them--that her parents lavished on the events of her childhood. She begins mentally unreeling the X-rated scenes the old folks never saw.

Ginny first replays her gropings with Joe Bob Sparks, the imbecile high-school star athlete whose lettered jacket "looked like the rear window of a Winnebago with stickers from every state." From there she moves on to kinky sex with Clem Cloyd, the town hoodlum, and then to a proper Boston women's college, "alma mater of vast battalions of female overachievers." When her prim devotion to the rationalism of Descartes collapses under the onslaught of Nietzsche, she drops out of school and into a lesbian affair with a leathery radical. A communal farm in Vermont claims Ginny next, and ultimately she sinks into a mindless marriage with the local snowmobile salesman. "The incidents in her life to date," Ginny fatuously decides, "resembled the Stations of the Cross more than anything else. If this was adulthood, the only improvement she could detect in her situation was that now she could eat dessert with out eating her vegetables."

Cartoon Eccentrics. Novelist Alther, 31, draws this story in broad strokes, and as exuberant caricature Kinflicks is authentically inspired. The chapter on Ginny's communal life at the "Free Farmlet" is a wicked send-up of half-baked ideas and less well-prepared menus: "Dinner was a murky soup, filled with dark sodden clumps that looked like leaves from the bottom of a compost pile and that tasted like decomposing seaweed, and whole grain bread which you needed diamond-tipped teeth to chew." The novel teems with cartoon eccentrics mouthing balloonfuls of in flated nonsense.

Unhappily, Ginny is equally onedimensional. A confessed "easy lay, spiritually," she makes Candide look like a graduate of assertiveness-training school. She has plenty of wise-girl things to say about her passively dumb behavior, but she has not really learned any thing from her myriad misadventures.

Alther tries to make the illness and eventual death of Ginny's mother the rite of passage that will turn the daughter into a self-winding adult. But Mrs. Babcock, whose suffering and despair are movingly portrayed, seems to have been smuggled in from a different novel. Kinflicks, for better and worse, belongs to Ginny and her amusing, if hardly profound, moral: Sisterhood is Slapstick.

Paul Gray

With reporting by Paul Gray

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